by Joe Sharp
“Now we’re even for the rusty gate,” she snarled.
Patrick lunged at her weakly, but the bearded man with the torch pulled him back with one calloused hand. He looked solemnly at the blood cascading down Patrick’s arm and he sighed.
“She bested you, boy,” he pronounced, which seemed to take the wind out of Patrick’s sails. “Go tend to yourself.”
Patrick glared at Jess one last time, then stumbled off into the shadows toward whatever hope there was left for him. She did not wish him well.
Jess was alone with the old man with the fire-stick. He had sent Patrick away, but she did not feel safer. Granted, he did not ogle her exposed body the way that Patrick had, but the way he paced, shoeless through the dark soil did nothing to ease her anxiety. She could feel something building, and she didn’t want to imagine how her situation could get worse.
The man stopped and turned to her.
“That was nasty business,” he noted evenly. “Did you really think it necessary?”
Jess’ body, racked with pain and stretched out before him, coughed up a mouthful of blood and skin and spat it at the man’s feet. He shuffled back a step and they watched the tissue being devoured by the hungry soil. Seemed the the ground beneath her feet needed to be fed. Jess was beginning to see a worse-case scenario.
“Why don’t you come closer,” she rasped, her mouth sticky with drying blood, “and I’ll tell you what I really think.”
“Miss Granger,” rumbled the man, stroking his dark beard, “I believe we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.” He stepped in front of her and bowed at the waist respectfully. It might have been endearing, if it wasn’t so despicable.
“We have not been formally introduced,” he continued. “I am your host, Colonel William Morgan Davis. A pleasure.”
He beamed at her with a smile that truly touched his eyes. He seemed genuinely pleased to make her acquaintance. Was he delusional? Was he a … a sociopath, incapable of feeling the sheer insanity of this situation? Jess felt like laughing in his face, but that could trigger a worse version of the man. Worse she did not need right now.
“Colonel …” she croaked weakly, the lingering ketamine still fogging her senses, “we did not … get off on the wrong foot. You are not … my host … you are my abductor!”
She spat the last bit of Patrick’s blood onto the ground, and jerked her head, flicking flecks of the stuff from her lips. Then, she nailed Davis with seething eyes.
“I was violated … am being violated … this moment! Do you really think … that I would feel pleasure … meeting you?”
Colonel Davis seemed to consider her words, nodding thoughtfully. He resumed his pacing.
“I suppose we should simply release you, then, eh?” He shot her a glance now and again. “Escort you to the city limits and watch you drive away with our little secret? In a week, or a month, the story would appear on the internet in all its sordid spectacle. Who would visit us then? The National Guard? FBI? Department of Homeland Security? How long before our little town was encased in a bubble? Our people cut off from …!”
Davis was bubbling himself, and Jess did not want to be here when he boiled over. She kept struggling against her bonds, but the tree seemed to tighten with every movement.
“You journalists never consider the consequences of your actions … only the story … and your glory.” He spat out the last word like it was blood in his mouth.
Jess blinked, unbelieving. It was like he wanted her, expected her to see things from this town’s perspective. That was a knee-slapper, she thought, fuming. Jess wondered if this was how Stockholm Syndrome began, appealing to a person’s sense of empathy. ‘Well, when you put it like that …’
Fuck him! This town’s perspective wasn’t even a blip on her radar! As far as she was concerned this whole town could grow scabs and ooze pus down into their eyes until they collapsed into a pile of fetid bones and rotted into the ground!
Jess felt her eyes bulging, and she sucked in a deep breath to calm herself. She decided she wouldn’t give Colonel Davis the satisfaction of seeing her rage. That she would save for later. But, when later came …
“Colonel,” she gasped, “… I’ve had a little time to consider the consequences … while hanging here, naked, on your tree … and I have come to the conclusion that this town should be trapped in a bubble … an airtight, inescapable bubble … like a bug under a glass jar! And I think that after your people have baked for a while under the summer sun … they should be taken out … one by one … and pinned to a laboratory table … their guts laid open … their insides cut out and pickled in jars of formaldehyde!”
Jess paused, her ragged breathing making it difficult to continue. Colonel Davis waited while she regained her composure. He had made no move toward her yet. After her breathing had calmed she added …
“Now tell me, Colonel … is there any question in your mind … as to what foot I am on?”
Jess used the rest of her strength to hold her head up, matching Davis glare for glare, and listening to the silence of the cemetery. The only sound was the rumbling of his torch. Apparently, they didn’t even allow crickets into Weeping Gardens. She felt so privileged.
A voice rode in on the darkness, a disembodied spirit, and Jess knew this voice.
“Are you convinced yet, Colonel?”
Colonel Davis cast down his gazed disappointedly. Apparently, Jess had failed some kind of test. She had a feeling that it was not weighted in her favor.
When Eunice Pembry floated into view, the Colonel stepped back and turned his eyes to the ground. The power had shifted, or had it been Eunice all this time?
Eunice took the torch from Colonel Davis, leaving him in the dark. Then, she turned her attention to Jess.
The steely creature that she had seen glaring at her across the front desk of the Rusty Gate was here in full plume. She held the hem of her brilliant blue dress up out of the soil, as she glided to a stop in front of Jess. Eunice looked her up and down, not bothering to hide her disgust.
Jess attempted a smile. “I’m afraid you’re not seeing me at my best.”
The woman finally looked her in the eye. “It is necessary.”
Eunice tilted her head and stared coldly, as if Jess were some oddity in a freakshow. It was obvious she wasn't seeing Jess; she was seeing a problem. Jess needed to distract her from the solution.
She eyed Eunice’s toes in the dirt, and thought back to Patrick’s skin and blood in the soil.
“Why doesn’t the soil consume you?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “It seems to like dead things.”
Eunice smiled a smile that Jess would get tired of very quickly.
“This tree and I have been friends for a very long time. It would no more consume me than I would take an axe to it.”
Jess swallowed hard and looked down at her own feet covered in soil. “Then, why doesn’t it consume me?”
Eunice replied, “I asked politely.”
There it was. Jess’ life was in the hands of this pint-sized Caesar from a dinky town in southern Ohio. She should have followed her first instinct; nothing good ever came from a trip to Ohio.
The Bible was wrong; it wasn’t the Devil who prowled around like a roaring lion, seeking to devour you …
… it was fear!
Razor-sharp claws of fear, and she could see them, just at the edge of her perception. They were there, tickling the side of her neck, an inch from her jugular. Jess had to get control of her fear, or she would be the next one bleeding out into the cemetery.
She drew herself up and put on a show of defiance.
“You know you don’t frighten me, bitch!” She screamed out the words through bloody lips. “There are people who know where I am! They’ll come looking for me!”
A grin touched the corner of Eunice’s mouth. “I care not whether you are frightened, child. That will not effect the outcome of our time together. And, as for your friends, well … Willow Tree has b
een in need of some new blood for a while now.”
Jess trembled at the word ‘blood’, because she knew that Eunice meant real blood. Is that all she was? New blood? Was she just meat for the … what had the Doctor called it … the ‘grinder’? Was she going to be used to fertilize the soil of the cemetery?
The claws were scratching lines down her neck.
“I emailed my notes to my editor!” cried Jess in a desperate gesture. “And I told him that if anything happened to me -”
Eunice held up a hand to Jess, cutting her off. She turned to Colonel Davis, who still stood in the soil. Her torch illuminated his faint shadow in the flickering dark. He seemed … smaller. Colonel Davis shook his head gravely. The woman swung back.
“Are there any more lies you wish to tell?”
Jess struggled against the tree as the claw drew blood.
“You can’t do this! You can’t make someone just disappear!”
A genuine look of bewilderment came over the woman’s face.
“Oh, I have no intention of making you disappear, child.”
Jess blinked.
The words were ice in her veins. Eunice wasn’t going to let her go … but she wasn’t going to make her disappear, then … what?
“What does that mean?” she asked through chattering teeth, shivering from the cold, and the hopelessness. “Are you keeping me around as some kind of pet?”
Jess thought about that until another thought crept in to her mind. “Not a pet … a slave. You people back then, all those years ago … you liked having slaves, didn’t you? Is that what you want? Someone to walk behind you with a shovel and clean up your messes? Someone to wipe your asses and wash your filthy underwear? Well, fuck you! I’ll never be someone’s property!”
The woman’s face betrayed a bad taste in her mouth. Apparently, Jess had ruffled more than the lace on her frilly dress.
“We Pembrys have never been slave owners, and we are not about to start with the likes of you! I have no need, or desire, of your services, young lady! I am quite capable of scrubbing my own backside!”
Jess strained against the roots of the tree and cried out, “Then what? What are you going to do to me?”
Eunice seemed surprised that Jess had not worked it out. “Not me, child …”
Then, she turned with her torch and looked down the long, winding path leading away from the tree. Jess had thought to cry out to Colonel Davis, but he no longer stood in the soil. Perhaps he knew what Eunice was going to do and he just didn’t have the stomach for it. Or, perhaps he was taking a nap in the soil. Either way, his absence pulled the thread that started her life unraveling.
Before the tears could come and blur her vision, she caught sight of a figure making its way down the path. At first, it was just movement in the mist. But then, it took on shape, and the shape was that of someone in a hooded cape.
The Doctor? Had she survived? Could anyone have survived the near-death that Jess had seen last night at the cemetery fence? It seemed unlikely, and this figure didn’t hobble down the path; it glided effortlessly.
As the figure stepped between the giant roots and into the crook of the tree, Jess saw that it was too slight to be a man, and that made her stomach lurch. She’d had about enough of the women in this town.
Eunice and her fire-stick met the woman at the edge of the tree root, and she spoke to her in whispers. The woman nodded at the words, then she padded through the soft soil until she reached the base of the trunk, and Jess’ splayed body.
The disorienting light from the torch behind her made it impossible for Jess to see the woman’s face clearly. Eunice seemed to have faded behind the flicker of the flame. It was just Jess and this woman. Whatever she was going to do, Jess wished that she would just get on with it.
“Who are you?” Jess spat. “What do you want?”
A rumble came from the tree as if to answer her wish. The roots that had bound her wrists and ankles until they were raw fell open and shrank back into the tree. Jess dropped face first into the soil … and it was like jumping under the covers of a warm, feather bed on a winter’s night. The soil swarmed over her skin, caressing her wounds, soothing her pain, making her want to stay. She curled her arms around the dirt, scrunching it under her head, and waited for sleep to take her.
This was how they got you, she thought, pain and pleasure, suffering and salvation. It was an effective technique, used by the most prolific sadists in history.
Was this life in Willow Tree? Is this what they all felt, the pain of the tree and the pleasure of the soil? She could see why they stayed. She did not want to leave and she hated herself for that. All she had now was her hatred of these people and this tree, and she could feel that melting into the earth. Who would she be when her rage and hatred was gone? Would she crumple like an empty cup and blow away?
She was scrunched down in the dirt when two small feet stepped into the soil where she lay. A chilling gust of wind left Jess shivering in a fetal ball on the ground. She wanted to crawl into the soil and pull the earth on top of her, but two hands took hold of her arms and pulled her up. She stood toe to toe with the unknown.
When the hands released her, Jess swayed like a reed, but she did not fall. She was proud of that, a small victory. But, she was trembling now and she could not stop. She clutched her arms and rubbed the prickly flesh. She would die of hypothermia if nothing else, and she thought that would be a senseless and pathetic way to die.
Jess, for a moment, felt the urge to call Eunice over so that she could feel the warmth from her torch. She marveled at how quickly her principles faded in the face of impending doom.
Maybe she deserved to die senselessly.
The silhouette in the hooded cape stood motionless, the only signs of life the rhythmic puffs of steamy breath exhaled from the hidden face. Jess matched her, breath for breath, but she could see her own becoming thinner, more vaporous. It hurt to breath, and soon it would hurt to live, and then she would stop.
Jess stared at the dark figure who presumably stared back at Jess and it was starting to piss her off. Good, she thought. Anger she could use.
“Why are you just standing there? Do something!” she chattered. “Why don’t you give me that goddamn cape? Can’t you see I’m freezing to death?”
The figure moved.
Out from under the cape came two tiny hands, and they reached up and slipped the hood back. Jess could see the flashes of firelight reflected through the curls of yellow hair. The face was a dark haze of eyes and nose and mouth, unrecognizable in the shadows. But that didn’t matter, because all Jess could see were the hands.
They were tiny hands … like a little kid’s hands … and Jess hated them.
The thing stepped forward, a hand reaching out …
“No!” Jess stumbled back and fell against the tree. She hugged it with her arms, this time willingly; this time willing the tree to protect her. But, it wouldn’t. Nothing in this awful place would. Jess was alone in the vacuum of space.
What had they done to her while she was unconscious? What had they taken from her?
“We took nothing from you,” said the thing, in a voice that Jess had only ever heard inside her own head.
“Then, how …”
“You cut your finger, do you remember that?”
The thing held up a finger in the dim light and it was the same finger.
“You heard it then; you heard the soil call to you. Patrick was there. Do you remember?”
Jess cringed at the sound of his name. “That fucking animal! I should have ripped out his fucking throat when I had the chance!”
“No, sweetie … your Patrick never left the cemetery last night. The Hatchet saw to that.”
“What … what are you talking about? He was just here! I bit his …”
“That was another. There are others … of all of us.”
Jess glared at the thing in front of her. “You mean there are more of … you?”
The thing lowered her gaze thoughtfully. “Perhaps someday. The tree will decide. But, there are many of the rest of us.”
Jess’ anger started to seethe as she thought of the other Patrick with his hands on her.
“And that monster … are there more of him?”
The thing fumbled her tiny fingers.
“We thought a familiar face might ease the transition. He was an … unfortunate choice. Some of us are … ill-equipped to deal with this life.”
“And my Patrick?” asked Jess, biting her lip anxiously.
“He was reclaimed by the soil. He can be with you again!”
The thing sounded joyous, as if they had not just murdered someone. Jess flashed on the Doctor’s tale of reclamation, the notes about a machine which ground people into pulp. She thought of Patrick, screaming as he died.
Jess looked at the young woman with the short, yellow curls … and she wondered if she would be capable of sinking her teeth into that throat the way she had Patrick’s.
Jess pushed off slowly from the tree and took a step to the side, her eyes glancing around cautiously. There seemed to be only her and the thing … and Eunice in the cemetery. She liked her odds against them.
“The soil will stop you,” said the thing.
“What?” asked Jess, stunned.
“That is what you were thinking … of running. The soil will stop you. And, there are the Hatchet. You cannot see them, but they are here.”
Jess’ hand went to her throat and she screamed at the woman.
“Stop thinking my thoughts!”
“They are my thoughts, too,” said the thing calmly, taking a tentative step toward Jess, “and, no … I don’t believe you would be capable of sinking your teeth into my throat.”
The last thread unraveled. Jess’ hands fell to her sides as the tears came. They came in a blinding rush and Jess swayed in the soil as the tears froze on her cheeks.
The thing reached a tiny hand up and pulled at the string around her neck. She slipped the cape off of her shoulders and Jess thought that, finally, she was going to drape it over Jess’ shivering body. But, the cape simply fell to the ground.